A developer community is generally defined is a group of developers gathered in a place to achieve a common goal. Thanks for reading!

Oh, you want to know what that looks like? Ok, I can understand that.

The purpose of a developer community and the pieces that build the community puzzle are complex and different for each unique case. Developer communities usually stem from a general problem of information silos, senior developers spending their days answering questions rather than coding, or product teams creating things that their communities & customers don’t actually need or want.

Communities are all centered around contributing and interacting with the express purpose of establishing a foundation of organic knowledge sharing, ultimately becoming an on-demand knowledge base for faster workflows and decreased support costs. The best developer communities encourage creation and curation of on-demand knowledge bases through gamification including badges, profile status achievements, and leaderboards. Games are a great way to increase engagement of the community, and developers aren’t unique in the way they want to show off their hard-earned knowledge. A great developer community will also decrease support costs by moving your support system from a one-to-many or one-to-one to a many-to-many system. This transitions your organization from having a support team answering technical questions or having a senior developer answering questions to a self-sufficient community that answers each other’s questions.

Speaking with a prospect the other day, their main problem revolved around the fact that their most senior developer is spending all day answering emails and messages for a team of 45 developers. They’re experiencing serious growing pains and needed a way to get him back to coding and building the product. His value is being wasted as a support member rather than what he’s an expert at. AnswerHub provides advanced search functions, easy tagging solutions, and expert identification in the area of Q&A which will potentially help this prospect create a support system of engaged developers rather than a "one-man army."

As we go more in-depth over the next few weeks of this series. We’ll cover how Q&A works in a developer community, what topic focused articles can add, and how ideation can give your product team a roadmap, giving them a better finger on the pulse of your customers (both internal and external).